1. Field
Apparatuses and methods consistent with exemplary embodiments relate to image fusing, and more particularly, to fusing a thermal image of a subject and a visible image of the subject.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a monitoring system including a visible image camera, a control apparatus and a display apparatus, a monitor observing a moving image in the display apparatus has relatively low information recognition ability and situation management ability in a night illumination range.
Accordingly, a thermal image camera capturing a thermal image of a subject has recently been added to display a fused image resulting from fusing a thermal image and a visible image.
In this fused image, however, the definition of an image is basically reduced in a relatively bright important region.
Accordingly, the following image fusing method has been used in the related art.
First, in a thermal image, pixels having luminance values higher than a mean of luminance values of a visible image are selected, and luminance values of these selected pixels are increased and luminance values of the other pixels are decreased, thereby to obtain another thermal image.
Secondly, the visible image and the other thermal image obtained as above are fused together.
According to the above image fusing method, the definition of an image in a relatively bright region may be partially improved. However, the definition of an image is reduced in a certain portion of the relatively bright region due to high luminance of the thermal image.